What can we know about Language Acquisition from Studying Reports of Feral Children? (Essay Sample)

What can we know about Language Acquisition from Studying Reports of Feral Children? [Name of Student] [Name of Institution] [Date] What can we know about Language Acquisition from Studying Reports of Feral Children? Introduction The most engaging and captivating feature of neurolinguistics is the unlimited magnitude of comprehension which could be grasped. It does not matter how much the different researchers understand and discover, there are centuries of growth and development still to be endeavored. The most complicated among all the mechanisms is the brain, and its various levels, specialization areas and functions give the mainframe of power and authority for the foundation of human physique, the spirit and even the life itself. The limits placed on this powerhouse give further areas of interest for the observers. One of such boundaries comprises of linguistic abilities and execution in connection with the age. CITATION Tre13 \l 1033 (Harley, 2013) The appearance of the hypothesis regarding critical age, also recognized as the critical period; attributed towards a neuropsychologist named as Eric Lenneberg in agreement with the language specialist Noam Chomsky's viewpoint that human beings have the inborn language principles, tagged the attraction of the psychological and the linguistic fields in connection with the development of language in context to sensory levels and social experience or absence of this kind of experience. CITATION Sin04 \l 1033 (Singleton & Ryan, 2004) The critical age can be defined as the time period between the birth and the adolescence during which children own the capability to acquire the first language. This first language is being obtained by children along with all its morphological, phonological, semantic and syntactic rules. CITATION Dan041 \l 1033 (Janik, 2004) Language Acquisition with Reference to the Reports of the Feral Children The several reports regarding the wild or the feral children have marked few of the most fascinating and interesting works for linguists and also for those individuals who are in the psychological progression or in the language fields. Actually feral children can be described as those children who have grown up in some serious isolation with almost no contact with the human beings. The absence of language exposure that many encounter makes noticing them a central premise for speculating age inclination or restrictions regarding the development of the native language. CITATION Ber11 \l 1033 (Wong, 2011) The Case of Wild Peter In the year 1724, Wild Peter was discovered in Hamlin, a German town. At that time, his age was around 12 years and he was described as a brownish, naked and a black haired living being. He was running here and there and was producing no human noise. It has been thought by some people that Peter was a genuine feral child, having being nurtured by the raw and the pure state given by the wild. CITATION Dou95 \l 1033 (Candland, 1995) As far as talking abilities of Peter are being concerned then it can be said that people around him have faced all sorts of difficulties just to educate him about several ways of talking. All those efforts were made so that researchers could discover something from Peter regarding his past lifestyle and also a little bit about his ideas and perceptions if possible. But all those efforts have gone in vain and Peter merely acquired enough to request about the most essential things in English language. The hearing abilities of Peter were pretty good, but Peter's pronunciation was much more like prattling instead of a distinguishing speech. Peter does not even possessed knowledge of providing answers to any type of questions and his capability to memorize things was not as fine as a wild animal's intuition. In short, there was the absence of humanness in Peter's nature. CITATION Mat10 \l 1033 (Saxton, 2010) Thus it is really difficult to conclude that whether Peter was able to acquire language or not. Many researchers have made a claim that he was a seriously retarded child that if he ever had acquired any language then he would be left with not even a single thing in his mind. The Cases of Chelsea, Isabelle and Anna Several other research studies have been made on the feral children who appeared similar to Genie, in order to strengthen the hypothesis of the critical age. Chelsea was deaf by birth and she was not familiar to language till the age of 31. Chelsea has received a substantial language treatment and has become capable to obtain a sizeable vocabulary but she has failed to evolve a grammatical sense in herself. However, in contrast to Genie; occasionally whose sentences appeared to possess the structural difficulty of an ordinary 2 year old child, Chelsea's sentences seemed to possess no formation at all. CITATION Sil08 \l 1033 (Montrul, 2008) The age of Isabelle was 6, when she was found from a closet. Isabelle had been confines in that closet along with her mute and deaf mother. Speechless and retarded, Isabelle was capable to acquire complete utilization of language ability and within a time period of 2 years, she had covered the phases of learning that most commonly demanded six. One other small girl named Anna was discovered when she was five years old. After being found, Anna had acquired the skill to speak sentences, she had learned to walk and had also learned to take good care of herself just after receiving treatment for 4 years. Unfortunately Anna was not able to survive for too long and had lost the battle of her life. Much more advancement might have been shown by Anna if she had got a little bit more time for improvement. The favorable outcomes in the case of Isabelle and the hopeful advancement of Anna, and besides them the absence of good results in Chelsea's case; encourage Lenneberg's theory that the development of language meets a borderline at a certain age. CITATION Mar13 \l 1033 (Martini, et al., 2013) The Case of Genie The most extensively studied and known case of a feral child named Genie was found in November, year 1970 in Los Angeles, California. When Genie was discovered, she was unable to talk, chew, walk and she could not even straighten her legs and arms. Genie had been confined in a room and was bound to a potty chair, for almost 13 years of her life. She had received no interaction or contact with the humans until discovered. CITATION Lor10 \l 1033 (Green, 2010) When Genie was found, she was being taken to a hospital for children located in Los Angeles under supervision of various neurologists, physicians, linguists, psychologists, therapists and psycholinguists. Genie was discovered to be at the growth level similar to a 1 year old child. She was regarded as a perfect subject, since Genie was past the pre- established critical age. The biggest question which arises there was that should Genie be able to obtain a first language completely and if not completely, how much language she will be able to acquire? Genie had made a really slow but a balanced progress for the following 4 years. In few ways, this progress can be called similar to the progress of a normal child. The accepted stages regarding the acquisition of language are babbling at 6 months of age, the holophrastic phase under which the phonological approach is developed by means of 1 word, after it there is a stage of speaking sentences consisting of 2 words occurring at 1st year's end. Then there is a telegraphic phase which takes place in the second year. In such a stage, children use word strings which lack grammatical terms or functions and they are utilized as a basic means of communication. Then finally, there comes a phase when it's really very tough to determine stages because the language development is very swift. This is known as virtual language escalation and it occurs between the age of 2 and 6 years. CITATION Dav07 \l 1033 (Carroll, 2007) Genie had obtained a varied and a large vocabulary after a rigorous therapy comprising of 7 months. After it she had started to talk and had begun with 1 word expressions, and then she had started to combine 2 words independently. But the telegraphic phase appeared to be a terminating point in the language development of Genie. Her advancement was too slow. Normally when a child reaches the stage of speaking 2 words, then just after some weeks of it their speaking abilities generally grows explosively and rapidly. But that was not the case with Genie, as her stage of speaking two words lasted for about four months and the negative expressions remained in similar state of growth for about three years. The phase of great escalation did not take place in Genie's case at all. Genie used to merge content words most of the time, and for Genie an increase in the length of the sentence simply meant increasing the amount of content words linked with each other and not of linguistic detailing either by the addition of grammatical markers or by an expansion in hierarchal difficulty. CITATION Eve09 \l 1033 (Clark, 2009) Therefore, the development does not take place syntactically and it just happened semantically. In the case of Genie, a huge signifier regarding the abnormalities in the developmental process was the diversity of words in her word stock. Researchers who have worked in close connection with Genie were struck with the fact that how dissimilar the words that Genie understood were from the dictionary words that small children would understand when these children are obtaining their first language. Discussion Due to the reason that Genie had possessed the ability to collect some sort of linguistic proficiency to a specific point, a transformation to the hypothesis of the critical age has been advised. Possibly, there is a slight time in which there is a chance of limited development; which ...